Steady progress for Milner, Tandy through two days in WEC’s second round
SPA-FRANCORCHAMPS, Belgium (May 6, 2022) – Nick Tandy qualified Corvette Racing’s No. 64 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R third on the GTE Pro grid Friday ahead of the Six Hours of Spa, the team’s second race in this year’s FIA World Endurance Championship.
Tandy set a time of 2:16.606 (116.383 mph) in the Mobil 1/SiriusXM Corvette. It put him three-tenths of a second off Gianmaria Bruni’s GTE Pro pole-winning time and has Corvette Racing in a strong position to challenge again for a victory Saturday in its first full season in the WEC.
This is the second straight appearance for the mid-engine C8.R at Spa, but the gap in qualifying shows how quickly the team has gotten back up to speed at a still-unfamiliar location. The Corvette Racing engineering team and crew spent much of Thursday and Friday running through a number mechanical and aero adjustments to get the C8.R into a good configuration for Saturday’s race.
This is Milner’s first career appearance at Spa while Tandy is a former winner at the circuit and has two previous WEC starts to his credit at the 4.35-mile, 19-turn circuit. Both drivers were satisfied with the feel and balance of the Corvette after Friday’s sessions with optimism present within the team heading into Saturday. They are looking to equal or improve on a runner-up finish from Sebring in the season opener.
The Six Hours of Spa for the FIA World Endurance Championship is scheduled for 7 a.m. ET/1 p.m. CET on Saturday, May 7 from the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. The race will air live on MotorTrend TV with live streaming coverage of the race on the MotorTrend On-Demand app. TV and streaming coverage will begin at 6:30 a.m. ET, as does Radio Le Mans’ live audio broadcast.
NICK TANDY, NO. 64 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C8.R – QUALIFIED THIRD IN GTE PRO: “Overall, I’m really pleased with the second day here – not just the qualifying but also the two free practice sessions. We obviously came here without the vast knowledge that our competitors have in their toolboxes. So we’ve been making steps every session. To be this close to pole position and the front row in qualifying is very pleasing. It seems a bit like a Sebring situation where we don’t have the outright, single-lap pace of the Porsche but a six-hour race isn’t won in qualifying. We’ve been working hard in practices to make the car good over the two-hour stints and not one lap. Hopefully that will pay off tomorrow.”
Saturday outlook: “The weather for tomorrow looks like it could be changeable. The best-laid plans may be thrown out, but we need to take each lap and each hour as it comes in order to react to the situations as they present themselves in the best way we can. As a team, Corvette Racing knows how to do that as well as anyone, so we’re confident we can put up a fight for the win.”
TOMMY MILNER, NO. 64 MOBIL 1/SiriusXM CHEVROLET CORVETTE C8.R: “It was very good this morning. It was great for me with the laps from yesterday now coming in this morning. Not that I feel that I already have all the experience that I need here, but I felt very comfortable in the Corvette. I’m very happy with the pace overall. For me obviously this is a bit of an unknown. Every time you come somewhere new, you wonder if you are going to be on the pace but I’m quite happy with the progress so far.
“This morning it was all about getting the car a bit better and Kyle (Millay, chief engineer) has done an awesome job with the setup changes and the ideas overnight to help improve the car. By the end of the session, the car was the best it has been all weekend. We stayed on old tires the whole session when everybody else changed tires at some point. So in that respect we’re super happy.”
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